Digital multifunction reprographic systems have grown in sophistication and function. In addition, digital multifunction reprographic systems are often used in environments where several identical or similar machines are present, all of which are connected via some sort of high speed/high bandwidth network. Since some of the jobs that may be submitted to such a machine require extensive computation, it is desirable that a machine can distribute large computing tasks to other cooperating machines on its network. Such sharing can expedite the processing of large or complex tasks.
To provide a job sharing capability, how a job should be partitioned between the processing components should be determined. Conventional approaches use fixed partitioning schemes or consider computational capabilities. However, these conventional approaches do not consider the communication properties of the network.
As noted above, a number of office devices may be connected to a network. Conventionally, these devices are largely independent, and the user interacts with a single device. However, there is an opportunity for a collection of such devices to act collaboratively by sharing resources and cooperating to perform a user's task.
An example of such a task might be the ripping of a very large, rich print job. Documents are typically described in a page description language (PDL) format such as PCL, PostScript, or PDF. The PDL provides a series of drawing commands and as part of the printing process these commands must be converted to a raster image. Frequently, it can take longer to do this rasterization than it takes to image the raster pattern on the paper. Thus, the printer may sit in an idle state while the document is being prepared.
To improve the productivity of the printer, a conventional system has been developed that consists of an array of processors and software to separate the print job into pages and to farm the pages out to various processors for parallel rasterization. However, this is a specialized (and expensive) piece of hardware, and would not be appropriate for occasional use in the office environment.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide a system enables a sharing of resources without relying upon expensive hardware.
Moreover, it is desirable to provide a system where the document is separated into pages that are then farmed out to neighboring multi-functional devices for parallel rasterization.